They've been banned for civilian purchase since 1986. The only automatics out there are the ones that were registered at the time of the ban. And in order to purchase one you have to go through an extremely rigorous background check, acquire a class III firearms license (essentially making you a dealer) and THEN find someone willing to part with the automatic they own.

Fully automatic firearms have been banned for civilians since the 1930's. The only way to legally posses one it to obtain either a manufacturers license or a Class III weapons license. Both of those require you to be entered into a national database and registration with the ATF.

they want to ban the semi autos, if legislation is passed it would be just as easy (and by that i mean extremely hard) for a civilian to go through the process of obtaining a full-auto. and the mini-14's rate of fire at SEMI-auto is 750 rounds per min, compare that to the AR's 800 rounds per min at FULL-auto and its pratically identical anyways.
link for proof: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-14

Yes, but thats not the typical civilian model, you have to get a class 3 license or buy one on the streets. You could make pretty much any weapon automatic if you wanted to. There still wouldnt be much difference if either of these were automatic, it would be so fast that we wouldn't be able to tell.

Okay, I'll buy that, an M4A1 Carbine, which is a fully automatic military variant of the AR-15 in the picture, cycles around 950 rounds per minute, so we'll peg the AR's cyclic rate somewhere around there. A full scale M14 fires around 800 rounds per minute on fully automatic, again, military grade. Since the Mini 14 is a scaled down M1A (the semi-automatic civilian version of the M14) and fires the same round as the AR, it should theoretically have a slightly higher cyclic rate. Either way, we'll just use the M4's cyclic rate, and the M14's cyclic rate to make this easy. Both weapons fire at a faster rate than is humanly possible to pull the trigger. So essentially, both weapons fire as fast as the operator can pull the trigger.

The M4A1 is not the same as the AR-15. The AR-15 is the semi-auto version, so the fire rate is non existent, it is "how fast you can pull the trigger". But, yes if we were talking about the military versions then yes your point is correct. Personally though I don't care about how fast it shoots, I want to hit my intended target. It is much harder to hit firing in full auto, you may hit something just not as often as aiming.

I didn't say they're the same thing. However, the way in which they operate is nearly identical, barring the fact that the AR lacks a select fire trigger group. Osskari was making the claim that the "maximum" rate of fire on an AR-15 is higher than that of a Mini 14. I used the fully automatic equivalents as examples to demonstrate the maximum cyclic rate of the design, not the weapons themselves. My conclusion was that both designs are capable of a rate of fire that cannot be reproduced with a human trigger finger. Therefore, whatever edge one design has over the other is completely nullified, because the rate of fire is only limited by how fast the shooter can pull the trigger. Lastly, as someone who's qualified on the M16 (sharpshooter, nothing special like expert or hawk-eye) I agree with you wholeheartedly that fully automatic *three-round burst in my case* is useless when trying to lay down accurate fire.